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User experienceBrief customer comments and use of AIMSSomerset County Council and overview by Nicola Dawson Civil Contingencies Manager: Local authority emergency planning in Somerset is delivered through a six local authority civil contingencies partnership. After earlier experience with Atlas Ops emergency management software, the Partnership is also using AIMS, a product which is designed to meet our requirements in terms of logging, messaging and tasking. With the large geographic areas covered and local authority offices in at least six locations, the Partnership is investigating the use of the internet hosted version of AIMS. Atlas AIMS was used as part of an emergency centre exercise in July 2007. The exercise was intended to validate the Corporate Emergency Response Plan and it took the form of an activation of the Somerset County Council Emergency Centre in Taunton. The scenario featured the discovery of an unexploded wartime bomb in the county cricket ground leading to the establishment of a 800 meter exclusion zone. This neatly covered the entire central business district of the county town, including the railway station, the Borough and District council offices and several hundred houses. Thousands of people to be evacuated. In the meantime, the town is hosting a major arts event in the main park. We were particularly keen to test the messaging and tasking functions so set up dozens of injects to simulate calls from the general public, concern from partner organisations etc. The County Emergency Centre is a suite of small rooms, used in peacetime for training so there are always challenges about keeping the centre staff informed. And this exercise was going from a cold start so we needed to allow time for the Emergency Centre to be set up. This meant that the first few meeting of the emergency management team were held in a senior officer's office. So how did AIMS perform? Staff liked the ease of use after minimal training and liked features such as the colour coding of tasks. The scrolling text bar come into its own for quick messages and updates. We did hit a problem with the way that our injects were being fed into the exercise and the interface between our corporate e-mail system and AIMS but we have identified a couple of ways round this for next time. In the hot debrief after the exercise, several exercise players said that they would like more exercises and more time to play with AIMS so that we could use its full potential next time. It is such a flexible system that we need to agree in-house protocols for its use. Possible role for the national AIMS user group perhaps? |
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